Bannon Backs Kelli Ward Over Jeff Flake in Arizona

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The Trumpist insurgency has picked its champion in Arizona. On Tuesday night, Steve Bannon endorsed Kelli Ward’s primary challenge to Senator Jeff Flake in front of a crowd of proud “deplorables” at the Scottsdale Hilton.

“It’s an open revolt, and it should be,” Bannon said, before introducing the former state senator. “These people hold you in total contempt … They think you’re a group of morons.” Bannon went on to inform the Arizonans that Jeff Flake “probably in his gut … doesn’t like you,” and that the GOP Establishment wanted them to “shut up.”

In recent weeks, the Breitbart rebellion had eyed Arizona state treasurer Jeff DeWit and former state GOP chairman Robert Graham as potential standard-bearers in the Grand Canyon State. But Robert Mercer, the hedge-fund billionaire whose largesse puts teeth into Bannon’s bluster, has been on Team Ward since early August, when he committed $300,000 to her super-PAC.

Arizona is an increasingly purple state. In a midterm where Democrats are expected to be more energized than Republicans — and where Team Blue has few more promising Senate targets than Arizona — the GOP will need every advantage it’s got to prevent Democratic congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema from winning a seat in the upper chamber next year. Replacing a quasi-moderate incumbent like Jeff Flake with an alleged (though, not necessarily actual) conspiracy theorist who has repeatedly evinced impatience for John McCain’s death — and who was, just this week, publicly denounced by two former Breitbart reporters who’d worked on her 2016 Senate bid — might look like a classic example of conservative self-sabotage.

And yet, at this point, it’s entirely possible that Ward is a stronger general-election candidate than Flake is. Which isn’t saying much: The Arizona senator’s approval rating is presently hovering at around 18 percent.

The number of voters who want their senator to publicly disparage the Republican president while doing virtually everything in his power to advance that president’s policies appears to be rather small. Had Flake decided to take at least one high-profile, substantive stand against the GOP agenda, he might be in better shape: Despite giving the president far more cause for consternation, McCain’s approval rating is about 40 points higher among Arizona voters, largely thanks to high levels of support from the state’s Democrats.

But he didn’t. And now polls show Flake trailing Ward by double digits in the GOP primary, and Sinema by high single digits in the general election.

It remains to be seen whether Trump himself will officially endorse Ward’s campaign. Although he tweeted a pseudo-endorsement in August, the president has been trying to make nice with Mitch McConnell in recent days — and the Majority Leader has little affection for Flake’s challenger.

Nonetheless, it’s hard to imagine Trump rallying to Flake’s defense. Beyond the fact that Trump despises public displays of disloyalty, there’s just little reason to think he’s a safer general-election bet. Ward may not be capable of winning over Democrats, but at least she can turn out Trump’s base. Flake, by contrast, can do neither — having done too little to distinguish himself from the president, and too much to live up to his own name.